


Any Extraordinary Habit

by summerstorm



Category: History Boys - Bennett
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-24
Updated: 2008-12-24
Packaged: 2018-01-25 05:54:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1635077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/summerstorm/pseuds/summerstorm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dorothy doesn't give most of her firsts much thought.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Any Extraordinary Habit

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Scott for the beta!
> 
> Written for solvent90

 

 

Dorothy doesn't give most of her firsts much thought. It is unusual, she thinks, that she doesn't recall many of them at all; where and when thoughts originated, the important stuff. Not the actions so much as the motives for them. Does anyone really recall those things?

Take her first boyfriend, for instance: she never looked into his eyes. She doesn't think she ever knew what colour they were. Some people have a knack for taking in all the details, however irrelevant they are, just because they're there and someone might ask about them. She saw the big picture, there. He was gangly and only about an inch taller than she was. They did not look good together, but she talked to him. Perhaps too much. In those early stages of life, one tends sometimes to be unreserved, to let everything float up to the surface.

Well, she was fifteen, then. She mostly looked at her own shoes when she was with him. Back when she was fifteen, people were more about being proper than about going to bed with other people at the earliest tick of the clock. Things happened, of course, the world was getting there, but it wasn't yet.

She wouldn't deal so well with that kind of freedom, she doesn't think. Or all would be platonic, which bears not much difference to how that first boyfriend was. Did she ever love him? You think maybe you do, when you're fifteen. Really you think absolutely, yes, you do, and realise much later that you didn't. There's the affection there. There's some passion, at times. 

There was that one girl at college, once. Her name was Sally, and Dorothy was reading Virginia Woolf around the time and perhaps that was when Dorothy began to feel frustrated about life, and history and other things. She remembers thinking when she first thought about Sally, there goes a girl who'll have it hard in life. Sally did not get along with other women, and men had no interest for what she wanted to say.

Par for the course, really, quite so.

And she was rather bright, Dorothy thought, and sometimes they held hands in public and it was just like it is now, that a girl cannot love another and survive on that, that there's the need for the husband and the children.

Not very transgressive, Dorothy was, or else she might have tried to push the envelope a bit and kissed Sally in public too, the way they did in private, with tongue and Sally's hands rummaging up Dorothy's shirt. They made a rather nice pair, the two of them, in the mirror, or in lieu of it on the reflective windows of bookshops they walked by and whatnot.

Well she doesn't know where Sally wound up. Dorothy never was the type to hold onto people who had gone of their own volition. 

Life, she thinks, life takes its toll. She used to be mad about that for a while, and then she wasn't anymore, just round the time she started to think that having lost touch with so many of her school friends had been not much of a misdeal. There's no first there, either; life takes its toll and at some point you realise it, realise that you're a part of someone else's and you can be a minor part or a major part but it's really life and its turnabouts who decides that. If you're relevant to the story or not. 

Or perhaps if you're relevant only to your own, or if you're relevant in thoughts rather than presence. Dorothy thinks sometimes that perhaps she would like that—; or would like to know that. To pick up a memoir and say, there I am, there I was, in the mind and memory of whoever wrote this, and this is how I affected them.

After all, there are many ways to play a part—many pauses to enter the stage, at whichever time or turn of things, and leave afterwards.

 


End file.
